This long-march of a blog draws on material I had hoped to see into print a decade ago—China Makeover, the perspective of a design professional then working in China. As classmate Jim Fallows has written, China’s vastness warrants many takeaways. Here is mine, on the buildup to the era of Xi-jinping. The Chinese Revolution in 1911 at long last ended thousands of years of dynastic rule going back to 2000 BC. Delegates meeting in Nanjing elected Sun Yatsen as provisional president of the Republic of China. Dr. Sun is still fondly remembered as the Father of Modern China. Educated in Hawaii, having visited Chicago, and discovered Lincoln, Sun modeled his Three Principles of the People of the new Constitution—nationalism, democracy, livelihood—on Lincoln’s immortal Gettysburg Address—of the people, by the people, for the people. I love that connection. I was amazed that my great aunt, artist and photographer Helen Paine Kimball, had stood within a few feet of Sun Yatsen, the Father of Modern China, tipping his hat to a crowd of Western well-wishers in Shanghai in 1913. Former President Sun Yat-sen tipping his hat to Western well-wishers on arrival in Shanghai in early 1913. Photo by Helen Paine Kimball (1881-1947) Unifying and modernizing China—vast in size, varied in dialects and ethnicities—continued to pose almost insurmountable challenges. Warlord infighting met Japanese occupation of Manchuria and points south. In World War Two, the Americans assisted the Nationalist government by basing Flying Tigers in central China. Four years after Japanese surrender ended their occupation came the Liberation, the proud work of the Communists’ Peoples Liberation Army, ending not just decades of civil war, but what the Chinese called “a century of humiliation” by foreigners, be they Europeans, Americans, or Japanese. As of 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) controlled the mainland, henceforth to be known as the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), while the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan, an island 100 miles off the coast, to maintain their Republic of China (ROC) government in exile. For the next four decades, while the U.S. and most other countries recognized the ROC, the PRC did not permit Americans to visit “Mainland China.” Though the PRC remained terra incognita to Americans, most weren’t buying the hype of various Western apologists. In fact, the place seemed primitive, ill clad, ill fed. If the thirty-hour train ride from Beijing to Shanghai only offered toilets only in the form of a squat toilet exposed to all, this was progress. But who were we to judge? No one suspected that CCP Chairman Mao’s big push from 1957-62, the Great Leap Forward, mimicking Stalin’s back in the day, was so bungled that it caused the Great Famine, with a death toll probably twice as large as the officially acknowledged astronomical thirty-five millions, while the Chinese people were being told that the people starving in capitalist countries were the ones who really had something to complain about. The difficulties were described as three years of natural calamities, but were mostly man-induced, from the demolition of thirty to forty percent of all housing to the deforestation of much of eastern China, and brutally enforced collectivization of peasants. The student unrest that started to unfold in the West in 1966 was no match for the virulence of young people’s unrest that Mao fomented in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that same year, in his bid to consolidate his power that was once again being challenged in the wake of his recent failings. The Cultural Revolution focused on eradicating old ways of thinking, indeed thinking itself. Intellectuals were reviled as “the stinking ninth category.” The people were going after “landlords,” although the State had owned all the land since 1949. While I was a college student majoring in visual and environmental studies and for good measure taking John K. Fairbanks’ and Edwin O. Reischauer’s celebrated survey history course on China, Korea and Japan, kids my age in China were becoming sworn enemies of everything for which we stood, denouncing teachers and parents alike, and losing face by self-criticism. The teenage and twenty-something children of Chinese professionals were fast becoming Red Guards and helping Mao “beat down the Four Olds”—Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, Old Ideas. Out of fashion were tolerance for religions like Christianity and pride in the glory of Five Thousand Years of Chinese History that would be touted a few decades later. Beijing’s Ming Dynasty city walls had to go, forty kilometers of them. Tactically, the Gang of Four, which included Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, was calling the shots as much as Mao, outmaneuvering the voice of reason in Premier Zhou Enlai, whipping up a frenzy of destruction and “class struggle” against “class enemies,” exacting confessions from “capitalist running dogs,” indeed punishing anyone who dared to own property or have an attitude. Two “olds” that did not make the short list were relationship (guanxi) networks and saving face (ai mianzi). At all levels in the hierarchy, these two olds played pivotal roles in the control of the group (“do it because you owe me”), the goals they set for themselves, and the impossible demands they made of their subordinates. The Red Guards were on a rampage so out of control that they were in essence the prime example of what social unrest would later mean for the CCP. Once central to the glory of Five Thousand Years of Chinese History, Confucianism was now so dead, and the Cult of Mao so strong, that the young obediently denounced their own parents and teachers as “counter-revolutionaries” and “revisionists,” meting out “yin-yang haircuts” and “jet plane rides”—arms held behind the back like wings to inflict humiliation and even excruciating pain. Universities, so recently restructured in the 1950s and now viewed with suspicion as fostering elites of no use to the masses, were being closed. Everyone recited endless quotations from Chairman Mao’s infallible Little Red Book, sold by the billions. All other book learning was replaced by book burning, all but obliterating the domestic record of the alleged glories of Five Thousand Years of Chinese History. The cultural elite were beaten down, beaten up, tortured, and killed. One million died. Losing face in the public ritual of self-criticism replaced saving face. This not-so-great Revolution itself would later be denounced, though extolled by some Chinese for giving the Chinese the gift of free speech for the first time. But group-speech denouncing the group’s superiors was a far cry from the individual right of free speech. That right remained unrealized into the era of Xi Jinping. And above all, the CCP would allow no freedom of the press. That would create social unrest. In 1971 the Chinese ping pong team invited the U.S. ping pong team to the PRC, ushering in the era of ping pong diplomacy. A year later, Nixon traveled to Beijing to shake Mao’s hand, a gesture China compared to waving the white flag. Our sense of face lost and gained in such ritualistic moments did not align with theirs. Suddenly, studying English in China went from being illegal to being indispensable to getting ahead. Foreign books, no longer condemned, opened eyes again. The universities, shuttered since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, started to reopen. But signals remained mixed as long as the Cultural Revolution continued. Though Americans then thought of it as our Bicentennial Year, for the Chinese 1976 was the Year of the Dragon, ordinarily the most auspicious of years in the twelve-year Chinese zodiac. But not this time. In China, 1976 became known as the Year of the Curse. In January came the death of Zhou Enlai, the beloved and urbane first Premier, the PRC leader whom the U.S. considered the voice of reason and who had personally greeted Nixon deplaning in Beijing in 1972. When Tiananmen Square attracted a huge outpouring of mourners for their “Beloved Premier” in April, the attempts by the anti-Zhou Gang of Four to suppress the mourning precipitated rioting. The year 1976 was also the year I went to Asia for the first time, to work as a landscape architect in Taiwan. In the spring my wife Lynn was selected as one of fifteen profoundly lucky young Americans to become a Luce Scholar. Named for the China-born son of missionaries who had founded Time-Life, the Henry Luce Foundation wisely sought to remedy the ignorance about Asia among the best and the brightest by sending young Americans to work for a year in Asia. Then in its third year, the program operated in East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and the ROC in Taiwan—but unfortunately not “the real China,” since the U.S. and China had gone without diplomatic relations for a quarter-century, nor Vietnam, Myanmar or Cambodia. After all, the U.S. was winding down a disastrous war against Communism in Vietnam in which the best and the brightest in their arrogance had made miscalculations based on faulty assumptions about the Asian world in every dimension. Through the Asia Foundation, which had offices in most Asian countries, the Henry Luce Foundation found work placements for scholars and their spouses in their chosen fields. Since the PRC was off limits to Americans, Lynn and I decided to go to Taiwan. Though it had lost its seat in the U.N. to the PRC in 1971, and only a quarter of its trading partners still recognized the Taiwan government’s claim to represent all China, Taiwan continued to flourish, with the second highest GDP growth rate in the world. Taiwan was one of the Four Asian Tigers. A year in Taiwan in 1976-7 proved to be the ideal preparation for a year in China three decades later. Days after we arrived in Hong Kong en route to Taiwan, Chairman Mao died. In our hotel room we took in the stunning news as black and white televised images lingered on mourners wailing over the Great Helmsman’s remains, with an emotional English-language voiceover. This was the biggest news yet in 1976. It was truly the end of an era. Although it would be months before we knew, the Cultural Revolution was finally over, and the healing after its decade of destruction could slowly begin, with the arrest of the Gang of Four in October. The Revolution had failed miserably to stamp out CCP corruption. Mao’s legacy fell woefully short of the idealism of the rhetoric, yet his image facing Tiananmen Square in Beijing, ground zero, remains to this day. We arrived in Taiwan to be greeted by “Recover the Mainland” billboards. Portraits of Chiang Kai-shek and Sun Yat-sen were paired in all public buildings. The big story was that while Taiwan may have been under martial law and under one-party rule led by refugees from the mainland, they had not taken over the economy or land ownership: the native Taiwanese continued to dominate both—and the Nationalists, perhaps chastened by the mess they had made on the mainland, had used their power wisely to develop the country’s export economy and its infrastructure in the Ten Major Projects, including rail and superhighways. They welcomed U.S. consultants, and cooperated closely with the U.S. on land reform and agricultural best practices through the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR), founded in 1948 on the mainland and then still alive on Taiwan. In its accomplishments, the ROC leapt twenty years ahead of the PRC. Taiwan was called the Economic Miracle, while the PRC remained a shambles. Dragon Mountain Temple, Lukang, Taiwan (1798, restored after 1999 earthquake) I had worked on Lukang in 1977. Unlike the PRC, Taiwan celebrated traditional Chinese culture, despite ever-increasing trade, exchange, and communication with the West. If baseball was the national sport, Taiwan lovingly celebrated Teachers Day on Confucius’ birthday, as I came to appreciate after I attended a moving ceremony at the historic Confucian temple in the heart of Taipei, whereas Confucius was still on the outs with the PRC. Double Ten Day (October 10) celebrating the founding of the Republic of China culminated in the most stunning display of fireworks I had ever seen. One of my ink brush landscape paintings in traditional Chinese style, Taipei, Taiwan 1977 I studied traditional Chinese ink brush painting—cherry blossoms, bamboo, pavilions hovering over mountain waterfalls, and leaned to inscribe my Chinese name in calligraphy. Every weeknight, a tutor came to our apartment and drilled us in our spoken Chinese. I worked in the Taiwan Tourism Bureau, in its Technical Services Division, alongside well-educated colleagues my age who spoke good English. I was responsible for the design of facilities at a network of Special Scenic Areas that attracted international as well as local tourists. Off limits was scenic Green Island, where political prisoners were jailed. Seeking independence for Taiwan from Nationalist rule was considered as punishable as supporting PRC claims to Taiwan. On matters of political sensitivity, the heavy-handedness of the two Chinas was still comparable. Taiwan Tourism Bureau Director General Chu honoring me with his calligraphy on my departure, 1977 Had there been no Taiwan for me in 1976-77, there would have been no China for me later. I knew enough spoken Chinese to make many friends, I knew how to accept cultural differences, and I knew how to go with the flow. But it went deeper: I felt a strong spiritual connection to a Taoist-Buddhist sensibility that had its local historical counterpart in New England Transcendentalism. I would be back in 1984, in 1988, and yet again in 2005. Each time I went back to Taiwan, I could see that the liberalization continued—“opening-up” by another name, long before the “Reform and Opening up” of which the PRC made such a fuss. If the ROC on Taiwan originally liberalized to score points with the West against the PRC, it hardly looked back longingly for a less prosperous or more disorderly time anymore. Taiwan functioned as an independent nation claimed by China as part of its nation, but could not officially declare as much. What it lacked in diplomatic recognition due to its uniquely ambiguous political state it more than made up for in its unambiguous economic state as an export powerhouse from plastics to computer chips. Meanwhile, Mao’s successor Hua Guofeng was doubling down on Mao in his soon to be infamous Two Whatevers: “We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave.” Resolute was never forever. In late 1978, after China adopted its third Constitution in as many decades, CCP paramount leader Deng Xiaoping initiated the Four Modernizations campaign focusing on agriculture, national defense, science, and technology. Deng remarked that Mao had been 70 percent correct and 30 percent wrong. The West was thrilled to hear about the Democracy Wall, where at long last ordinary Chinese could post suggestions, and where political dissident Wei Jingsheng proposed the “fifth modernization,” democracy. They had a year to delude themselves, before Deng Xiaoping had the Wall removed, foreshadowing his behavior in Tiananmen Square a decade later. Deng Xiaoping became the first CCP leader to visit the U. S. Along with millions of others that January 1979, I watched the telecast from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in which singer John Denver entertained Deng by greeting him with “Mr. Vice-Premier, it is with great joy that we welcome you to our country, and it is with true love that we extend our very best wishes to you and your people, on your ‘New Long March Toward Modernization In This Century,’” and then singing Rocky Mountain High. Deng instituted the counter-revolutionary Four Moderns and “Reform and Opening up” granting Americans access to China for the first time in three decades. Deng also announced “One Country, Two Systems,” in effect acknowledging that the system in the PRC was hardly the same truly open system of Hong Kong and Taiwan. By 1981 he could proclaim that the Cultural Revolution, in which a million people had died, was an official “catastrophe.” In 1984 Deng rebranded the economic opening-up begun in 1979 as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The phrase was catchy. Unfortunately, one of the characteristics was an inability to eradicate a culture of rampant corruption—punctuated by the occasional show trial—that a longtime expat Communist and CCP member like American Sidney Rittenberg bemoaned finding on all sides when the CCP finally released him from wrongful imprisonment. In 1987 Deng acknowledged that central economic planning no longer drove the Chinese economy, while Taiwan ended thirty-seven years of one-party rule in 1986, lifted martial law in 1987, and began to allow its citizens to visit China. China in 1988 was full of the hope of economic growth and democratization—delivering the full promise of a Chinese society that had opened up. Only a year after the PRC opened up to Taiwanese visitors, in 1988 Lynn and I finally got to visit mainland China, at least Beijing, with the Henry Luce Foundation. I may have missed the wall-encircled version of Beijing and the original smaller Tiananmen Square that survived intact until the 1950s, but at least I got to see the fabled city before the skyline was upended with inane high-rises, the sky polluted to a pulp, the hutong neighborhoods eviscerated, and the roads clogged with cars, all of which would happen in the next two decades. If the airport roof had solar panels, the road from the airport was a mere two lanes wide ride, through open country. If there were already cars, there were still millions of bicyclists, and no second and third ring roads. Foreigners were required to use foreign exchange certificates to make purchases. The big Henry Luce Foundation event was meeting one of the Eight Elders of the CCP, Li Xiannian, at the Great Hall of the People. Recently made Chair of People’s Political Consultative Conference, the veteran of Mao’s Long March had risen to prominence after Mao’s death to become one of the most influential architects of China’s economic policy after the Cultural Revolution and become President of the PRC from 1983-1988. Henry Luce Foundation with Li Xiannian in Great Hall of the People, 1988 At a banquet on that visit I was seated next to Hou Renzhi, a retired Peking University professor of geography and urban history. Born in 1911, the year of the birth of Modern China, he gained exposure to the Western field of historical geography while earning his PhD at Liverpool, in time to return to the New China in 1949, ran marathons, was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, became renowned as a pioneer in the field of historical geography and lived to be 100. When I met him he was a lean and vigorous seventy-seven. Prof. Hou told me how he had been one of those who were shouted down during the Cultural Revolution as he tried to save from the Red Guards, whose slogan was “smashing of the Four Olds,” what was left of Beijing’s magnificent city walls already largely demolished for a subway line and air raid shelters, only to have one of those who had shouted him down apologize years later, telling him that he had been right all along. They were now friends. Nowadays, if you wanted to experience an elevated people’s greenway, you had to walk the walls of Xian or Nanjing. What a difference a year made. In the spring of 1989, Prof. Hou was leading a tour of Beijing’s city wall remnants along the second ring road when events in the heart of the city took a dramatic turn. Soon after the death of beloved pro-democracy reformer Hu Yaobang, students gathered in Tiananmen Square both to mourn him and to demand democracy of their government. Though cellphones had not yet been invented, word spread rapidly by fax machine. Intellectuals, students, workers, even some peasants from the countryside gathered in the center of the capital city, indeed gathered in scores of other cities as well. For the first time in Chinese history, coming from all walks of life, to use Mao’s phrase uttered here in 1949, the people had stood up to express frustration at rising inequality, rampant official corruption, and the lack of democratic freedoms. In Tiananmen Square, exercising their right of free speech, students read aloud both the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address in translation. They hardly expected a repeat of what happened there after Zhou Enlai’s death twelve years before. Though the demonstrators committed not one act of violence, the government imagined huge risks to the country. Seeing its legitimacy threatened and the nation’s existence imperiled by social unrest, spreading like a contagion since the fall of the Soviet Union and political reform in Eastern Europe, and now to 80 cities across China, the frightened government reacted in a harsh crackdown in Beijing that was forever etched on the minds of Chinese participants and observers and millions of Westerners who were riveted by the television coverage and subsequent eyewitness accounts. The most enduring images were the highly symbolic clone of the Statue of Liberty erected in the Square and Tank Man, a lone figure standing in the middle of Chang’an Road, gesturing with his two shopping bags, halting a line of tanks sent in to enforce the will of the state. After the tanks shut off their engines, the man climbed onto the turret to talk to the human being hidden within. It was a gesture of nonviolent resistance in the heroic tradition of Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. His fate remains a mystery. Eyewitnesses reported seeing pro-democracy demonstrators crushed by tanks, and soldiers bayoneting mothers and children. Deng had cracked down on the Democracy Wall a decade before, and now was implicated again. But which army leader was really to blame for the brutal tactics of the People’s Liberation Army that resulted in the death of 300 to 1000 unarmed democracy-denied civilians? And some commanders in the People’s Liberation Army had been opposed to violence against the People. The opportunity costs were enormous. The perceived brutality in the crackdown cost the PRC dearly in the public relations tug of war with Taiwan, and in international investment for a while. What the West called the Tiananmen Massacre remained a taboo topic in China, which wanted to avoid social unrest at all costs. The abrupt turn away from the people’s consensus as if none could be had, only chaos, placed China squarely and defensively on the sidelines of global democratization. By 2023, as electoral democracies benefited 45 percent of the world’s population, China was working overtime to assert the superiority of its system of government for the people and churn out “democracy has failed” screeds. In 2023 one might think they are winning. Don’t bet on it, any more than investing in its real estate. Given what China has been through with nearly two centuries of foreign powers cutting up China “like a watermelon,” dynastic decline, warlords, a brutal Japanese invasion, and civil war, how can we in the West really blame them or begin to feel their pain? Self-inflicted wounds come with a history. Doubling down on official Tiananmen amnesia, China chose to rebuild its way out of the 1989 crisis. Indeed, in 1993 it became a net importer of oil for the first time, and Beijing was already trying to rein in the real estate bubble before the economy and social unrest spun out of control. The phenomenon of empty blocks replacing farmland, and landless ex-farmers forced to live in otherwise barren blocks could trace its origins back that far. As long as the nation grew and the standard of living improved for the masses, the people would choose stability over social unrest, economic growth over stagnation, leaving for another day the luxury of human rights and justice before the law, or so the state reasoned, and postponing the day of reckoning with the ever-ballooning real estate bubble. One thing that was off the table was another famine. Chinese citizens could now talk to foreigners and not get arrested; with the danger gone, there was a sense of risk-free and optimistic adventure in the air. But still the riots broke out in far-off ethnically non-Han Chinese strongholds like Xinjiang and Tibet, where with irony that escaped the CCP, they dealt with the locals precisely the way the much-hated Japanese had with Manchuria back in the day. And still the official voice of the state was shrill; nuanced discussion was an oxymoron. The persistent state-stoked narrative of national humiliation promoted by Mao, Chiang Kai-shek, and Sun Yat-sen before them—victimhood at the hands of colonial powers whether European or Japanese—wuwang guochi, “Never forget our national humiliation,” would in fact soon be forgotten a lot of the time, although trotted out whenever the state felt its power eroding. That, and protesting when something “hurt the feelings of the Chinese People.” Meanwhile, on the political front, Taiwan kept up the pressure on the PRC by the force of its counterexample. In 1989 Taiwan had embraced legislative reform, culminating in the retirement of the old Nationalist representatives of Mainland provinces, and not a moment too soon. In 1991 Taiwan held its first national elections, and newly elected President Lee Teng-hui formally recognized the PRC government, as if to say the ROC enjoyed the status to do such a thing. Henceforth, the ROC would no longer claim to represent all of China; it had been some time since that old rhetoric had seemed credible. President Lee’s reforms extended to inviting free discussion of sensitive political issues of Taiwan’s past, an opening-up of thought. Taiwan was occasionally in the news as forever living under the threat of a PRC takeover, given the PRC’s prickly insistence on preserving the “Motherland” and intolerance for “splittists.” When Taiwan held its first direct presidential election in 1996, the PRC’s attempt to intimidate the Taiwanese electorate by staging war games in the Taiwan Strait backfired into yet another public relations gaffe. The U.S. dispatched two aircraft carrier battle groups to the region. By the 2010s the naval intimidation became habitual. In electing Democratic Progressive Party candidates Chen Shui-bian as President and Annette Lu as Vice-President of Taiwan in 1996, a Chinese people had freely voted for the peaceful transition of power for the first time in Chinese history. Ordinary Taiwanese people had voted, and not for reunification. In 1997, Hong Kong reverted to China with the assumption that it would be able to keep its democratic system for the next fifty years, much to the relief of an apprehensive world. From the vantage point of 2023, we can see how shortsighted that sense of relief was to be. After the death of Deng, China stayed the course of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” rather like capitalism in socialist clothing, under the new PRC leader Jiang Zemin, the former mayor of Shanghai, and as liberal and pro-Western a leader as we could hope for. In October 1997, Jiang visited Washington and with president Bill Clinton agreed to establish a regular consultation mechanism for defense. Jiang then spoke at Harvard, in halting English, about our common destiny. In 1999 Premier Zhu Rongji signed a joint statement with Clinton on China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), promising reforms to increase transparency and protect intellectual property, and unleashing Chinese industrial might beyond anything the world had ever seen. Foreign direct investment exploded. Capitalism with Chinese characteristics had taken root. Even as I paid attention to all these momentous events, I had been assuming that a new generation was in charge in Taiwan and in no need of advice from Americans, much less Americans of the previous generation. I assumed the same about China, whose reputation had been sullied by Tiananmen. But I was wrong on both counts. The PRC and Taiwan were becoming more interlocked economically: now their peoples could even travel back and forth to sightsee or visit relatives. Between the PRC and Taiwan, the days of antagonistic clashing over ideology seemed, until the Xi Jinping era, to be behind them. In 2001 Taiwan joined China in the World Trade Organization. And both the PRC and Taiwan still looked overseas for design advice. I was about to put everything I had ever learned to work in Taiwan once more. And it would take me across the Taiwan Strait to the China that had been closed to me when I had first gone to Taiwan in 1976 and that I had barely seen in 1988. In 2005 an old Tourism Bureau colleague from 1977 and now the Bureau’s Director General invited me back to consult on 23 special scenic area construction projects over a three week period. When I was back, I was amazed at the power of democracy. Taiwan was moving on from trying to suppress dark moments in its own past to finding ways to acknowledge them and mourn the victims. In downtown Taipei, it had created the 2-28 Peace Memorial Park, two blocks from the Presidential Palace, to honor the victims of the “228 Incident” of Nationalist Party brutality against native Taiwanese that occurred on February 28, 1947, a forbidden topic when I had been in Taiwan before. Of all the sites I consulted on, the most profoundly moving was Green Island. Off limits in 1977 when it still housed political prisoners, totaling anywhere between 30,000 and 70,000 from 1951 to 1989, Green Island was now a vacation destination attracting 349,000 visitors annually. Its mix of spectacular unspoiled scenery, the only seafront hot springs in Asia, its Human Rights Monument, and prison museum showcasing human rights progress had the power to win many friends for Taiwan. What Robben Island and its political prisoner Nelson Mandela meant to South Africa, Green Island and its political prisoners meant to Taiwan. American land artist Maya Lin would recognize the big design idea of the Green Island Human Rights Memorial, also known as the White Terror Memorial Park: an inscription wall descending into the earth, with hundreds of names inscribed in the sandstone. No, these were not the kind of heroes who had gone off to Asia to fight a war against Communist revolutionaries and for whom decent records were kept, as with Maya Lin’s celebrated Vietnam Veterans Memorial. These were a different kind of hero, the names of Taiwanese imprisoned for simply voicing dissent, when the Nationalist government did not recognize the right of free speech, or even the right to a decent record. Some of the inscriptions were ringed by a dark grey oval, burnished by the tender touch of adoring hands, for these were the names of people who were now leading Taiwan to greatness. Green Island memory wall. Tourists have touched the names of admired Taiwanese once incarcerated in Green Island Prison enough to leave smudges Heading the list were Taiwan’s top two leaders, President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President Annette Lu, perhaps the highest ranking Chinese woman anywhere, a graduate of both Green Island Prison and Harvard Law School. Lu had been one of the Kaohsiung Eight, arrested for a pro-democracy demonstration on Human Rights Day in that city in 1979 when Taiwan was still a one-party state. Among other famous prisoners was Cai Ruei-yue, Taiwan’s first lady of modern dance, who had never breathed a word of it to my wife 29 years earlier when Ms. Cai taught her traditional Chinese dance. The Memorial spoke to me not for its design but for the fact of its existence, what it represented, and what that meant. It represented the triumph of democracy and human rights for the largest predominantly ethnic Chinese population outside China. And that meant Taiwan had gained enormously in good will and world admiration. As I could personally attest over the last thirty years, Taiwan had a great story to tell, one of incredible economic and political progress, a fabulous success story in so many spheres. In Taiwan, innovation goes hand in hand with a deep respect for tradition, the environment, and human rights. Now that our three children were out the door, with Lynn’s encouragement I looked for opportunities in China in late 2006. Little did we know how perfect the timing was: the year of 2007 proved to be the banner year for China’s GDP growth, 14.2%, almost double the 8% target, itself far ahead of any other economy. Record numbers of development projects needed to be designed. Alongside just about any other profession one could name, in China landscape architects were in as much demand as the world had ever seen. Old and new in Shanghai as I found it in 2007 When I moved to Shanghai I hardly knew what to expect. As director of design at a Chinese landscape architecture and urban planning firm, and the lone American, I wondered how well I would assimilate. I needn’t have worried. Traveling all over China to meet with clients, I discovered that the Chinese people had a healthy appetite for almost all things American. Once banned under Chairman Mao’s dictatorial rule, American pop culture was everywhere. But it was not just pop culture that interested them. I was amazed that in school many had read American classics such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. At a conference on visionary urban planning, where I was the only non-Chinese, the big red banner behind the stage was emblazoned with a huge image of Abraham Lincoln, patterned on the famous Daniel Chester French statue at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. I asked several attendees how Lincoln was relevant to an urban planning conference in China. “Because he represents good government,” they said, gently implying that that should be obvious. Projects that would take years to get off the drawing board in the U.S. got built in months here; orders were given, people were moved, and, presto, a half billion square meters of new residential and commercial space were built every year. The Great Leap Forward these days was the real deal. Though the CCP still proudly displayed the official portrait of Mao overlooking Tiananmen Square, no one talked anymore about “class enemies.” Only curio shops were selling the Little Red Book. If the scars of that age of suspicion and denunciation ran deep, no one was admitting it now. The odd juxtaposition of the Stars and Stripes and the portrait of Mao in a Tiananmen Square tour group during a sand storm in 2010 The Chinese did not yet have the vote for their own top leaders but they voted for the leading facets of Western life in countless ways. Whereas they made no secret of their visceral hatred of the Japanese that not even apologies for the Rape of Nanjing and the like could ever cure, they held no such visceral hatred for us. Au contraire. The U. S. was the ambitious Chinese student’s destination of choice for studying abroad. Pregnant mothers seeking a stateside birth to confer US citizenship were voting for American stability, freedom, and educational opportunity over what they had back home. We took for granted that of course their business attire was Western; they could have continued with local garb even as Arabs and Africans did theirs but wisely chose not to. Long gone were Mao suits, the opposite number of leisure suits in the U.S. back in the benighted day. Recently Paramount Leader Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, former low-level Red Guards, wore Western attire and parted their jet-black medium-length hair to look like Westerners, not like their buzzed Communist parents. Regular people wore jeans with abandon, even baseball caps, including the Red Sox, and flaunted iPhones. The armed forces and police wore uniforms whose antecedents were hardly Asian, and sometimes a tad fascistic with the jackboots. On airlines, in mostly School of Boeing aircraft, the utensils of choice for all meals were not chopsticks. As to the second language of business here, the Chinese had voted with their commercial signs, traffic signs, and road signs, subway ticket machines and ATMs which proudly displayed not French or Japanese or Russian, but their best English. The street signage symbol for parking was P. They taught English as a second language and it began in primary school now; we had not yet begun to reciprocate, although we should: it would be a strategic national investment. They used “OK” more than we would ever use “haode,” and routinely signed off with “Bye bye” on the phone, and punctuate Chinese texts with Western exclamation points and question marks. Coffee drinking had taken the land of tea by storm; Starbucks was in every major city and had attracted many clones, pirates, imitators, coffeecats, none of which could resist using a logo that was round and ringed with white letters, everything but the mermaid. Coke had long been popular, and at the 2008 Shanghai World Expo it was the most popular exhibit in the consumer brands area. Fast food chains like KFC were ubiquitous. Water calligraphy in a park in Yangzhou, 2007--an ephemeral artform. The brush is linked to a water tank strapped to the back of the artist In the English class that I gave in the Shanghai and Beijing offices, I once chose as our subject what American movies my colleagues liked, and why, and what they disliked. The guys loved the action and fantasy flicks like Spiderman, the women chick flicks and TV shows like Sex and the City, just as in the West. Some had seen older classics like Gone with the Wind, and newer ones like The English Patient. The people adored not just our movies but our music in ways Westerners did not reciprocate. They sang our Happy Birthday song with Chinese words. Cell phone jingles I’d heard included Oh Susannah, Singin’ in the Rain, and the Eagles’ Hotel California. Hotel electronic muzak included Simon and Garfunkel’s’ The Sounds of Silence. The schoolyard behind my Shanghai office regularly blared Western and only Western music, Bolero and Pachobel’s Canon. Department store floors decorated with huge posters of Western models sold with sentimental fare like As Time Goes By, The Way We Were, and Bridge over Troubled Waters, all covers, no doubt royalty-free. I had caught people in the firm and taxi drivers whistling Ode to Joy or Silent Night (I concede these are not English) and Jingle Bells, the latter a little bit of New England in Shanghai (James Pierpont, Boston, 1857). Another taxi driver was humming along with everything on a Western classical music station. Indeed, I had heard so little Chinese music in China, classical or pop, that the vote seemed to be overwhelming. But it had been no overnight phenom. Western classical instruments and orchestration had amplified the cause of socialist revolution since the beginning in China, and with the opening-up, the familiar instrumentation and borrowed soundscape could hardly be expected to diminish. Chinese virtuoso violinists and cellists vastly outnumbered Western virtuoso performers on the guzhang. Western appreciation of sounds Chinese was not keeping up. We needed to be directed to the Chinese Beethoven, or even Pachobel. Surely with five thousand years of civilization, there was a vast musical repertory waiting for Westerners to hum along with. We Western barbarians needed to be properly schooled, was all. They and everyone else voted for perhaps the most far-reaching of all American inventions, the internet, the personal computer and the cellphone. Across China, the new generation, unlike their parents, were computer-literate early, facile with the keyboard’s indispensable Western alphabet, often as preschoolers. As soon as in primary school, people were voting for the Western alphabet as indispensable to computer literacy. The number symbols used in Chinese computers, texts, and traffic countdown signals were in Arabic, like ours, not their own cumbersome number characters. They went along with the Western calendar (Chinese New Years falls many weeks after ours), and dividing a day into twenty-four hours, systems invented long after they had come up with their own. I am profoundly grateful for their vote for American software, from operating systems to Excel spreadsheets to PowerPoint, which was called “PPT,” and above all for Google, whose maps and satellite images made far off places seem very near. For years Chinese urbanization happily borrowed many great inventions and innovations from the West—elevators and escalators; trains, planes, and automobiles; train stations, airports, and superhighways; high-rises and underground parking; tunnels and subways; large public parks, hydroelectric dams, and the power grid. Guangzhou high rises in 2014. Formerly known as Canton TV newscasts, milk cartons and soda cans, business cards, telephones, gas stations, cars and even the legions of concrete trucks all looked all-American. The military and airline uniforms were Western knockoffs. Their nautical and aeronautical charts were virtually identical to ours. Even the party elite, whose parents had worn Mao jackets, sung the Ode to the Motherland and read the Little Red Book, took up golf as the ultimate status symbol. They played American-invented sports like baseball and basketball. One hundred universities offered baseball studies. The votes for American leisurely pursuits and technology across all fields could fill a book. It was just easier to adopt than to start a parallel universe from scratch. Very little was left that was pure Chinese except local foodstuffs, household products, crafts, and sundries. The voting went back even before the CCP era. Even the realm of pre-CCP memorial architecture owed something to the West. Did the architect Henry Bacon and the sculptor Daniel Chester French who together designed the sublime Lincoln Memorial have any idea how that idea would take wing and end up in China? And yet both China and Taiwan boast memorials to revered leaders whose exterior architecture may not look classical, but whose interior sanctuary focuses on a monumental statue of the hero, neither standing nor lying in state, but seated. Dr. Sun Yat-sen was so honored in Nanjing in the 1920s, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in Taipei in the 1980s. Now we in the West may take all this homage for granted, but we really ought to be profoundly grateful. In 2010, having led the world out of recession, China’s economy surpassed Japan’s to become the world’s second largest, 90-times bigger than when leader Deng Xiaoping ditched hard-line Communist policies in favor of free-market reforms in 1978. If China ever becomes our Overlord, I seriously doubt that they will flip this all into a neo-Sino culture makeover with Chinese language at the helm. We may well remain the overlords of innovation for a while yet. When my Shanghai-based AGER Boston office won a design competition in Taiwan in 2011, I spoke in Chinese and showed an image of me at the Taiwan Tourism Bureau 34 years before After I opened the Shanghai-based design firm’s first overseas office in Boston, indeed the first bona-fide office of any Chinese design firm in the U.S., I found myself drawn to the idea of writing a book on urban public space best practices. I wanted nothing important to get lost in translation, so my vision for Cities with Heart included the original English text and the Chinese translation side by side. The company had hired Ran Weiming, a young Shanghai-based bilingual communications specialist who not only understood my English, but educated me by Skype on the differences in exposition between our two languages, both as to logic and to clarity. When I finally met her on a company trip to Shanghai World Expo in 2010, she mentioned that she had been captivated with Thoreau’s Walden since she was a fifteen-year-old high schoolgirl living in a mountain village a few hours outside Qongqing. I was stunned that she had found Thoreau in such a place. She loved Transcendentalist writers like Emerson and Fuller. If this global connectivity was where our world was heading, it was a good place. It was my pleasure to make sure she saw Walden, birthplace of the modern environmentalism movement. On the first day that she had ever spent outside China, a jet-lagged Ran knelt before the pile of pebbles brought by pilgrims from all over the world to Thoreau’s cabin site, and added her own offering with these words for Henry: “My name is Ran, and you may not know me, but I knew you when I was a fifteen-year-old.” Henry surely smiled. Ran Weiming, who discovered Walden as a teen, on her first day ever out of China, at Walden. 2011. Sadly, the Xi Jinping-Covid era has chilled the warmth of those days. There is blame on both sides. China looks at our current state as if it confirms the superiority of its system of government, even as ominous economic signs hover over the Chinese mainland. Indeed, even before those signs began to appear, Xi Jinping’s ponderous tome The Governance of China (2014) included this admission: "Actually, how to govern a socialist society, a completely new socialist society, has not been clearly addressed by world socialism so far." In Taiwan, democracy soldiers on, while across the Taiwan Strait, far from having anything close to a majority, the CCP that rules the Peoples Republic of China counts less than 7% of those people as CCP members. One word on the t-shirt of a young urban Chinese says it all, Hainan, 2007

mostly written over two decades ago, mostly still ringing true I am a sentimentalist. I am not afraid to be influenced by emotional feelings—“gut feel” of a different kind than intuition. By that I also mean, I am good for a good laugh and a good cry, or at least a few tears. I am with Australia-based tech consultant Mehmet Yidiz’s observation that “Laughter and tears offer us avenues for emotional release, self-expression, and connection with others.” As Readers Digest used to point out, laughter is the best medicine. Humor is tonic. There is little controversy surrounding that notion. To quote HelpGuide.org, “Laughter strengthens your immune system, boosts mood, diminishes pain, and protects you from the damaging effects of stress. Nothing works faster or more dependably to bring your mind and body back into balance than a good laugh. Humor lightens your burdens, inspires hope, connects you to others, and keeps you grounded, focused, and alert. It also helps you release anger and forgive sooner.” More succinctly: Humor breaks the ice, launches speeches, even saves relationships. Seen on a high school blackboard a while back: She who laughs lasts. Go for the jocular vein. Jest for the health of it. Laughter aside, I see sentimentality as mostly the realm of “aww” and tears of joy. As I indicated in my post “What Matters is What Moves Us,” I am moved by stories of reunion, compassion, forgiveness, and reconciliation. So what if the movie story line is a manipulative tearjerker—let the tears flow! They are healthy. Like the internet says, shedding emotional tears releases oxytocin and endorphins—chemicals that make people feel good and may also ease both physical and emotional pain. (Oxytocin, not OxyContin) In co-authoring my college twenty-fifth reunion survey, I went so far as to insert this question: “Do you find yourself crying out of joy, empathy or poignancy more now than as a recent college grad?” Over half of the 487 respondents agreed. Of the several hundred questions on the survey covering all aspects of our lives, this one stood out. When people praised the survey, they cited this question. Perhaps I was onto something. Only later did I discover that anthropologist Ashley Montagu in 1981 had argued that we suppress weeping at our peril. Humans must socialize, and weeping shows we care. One of the many unexpected pleasures of getting older is that tears flow more freely from moments of feeling connectedness and empathy, across generations, even across time. These feelings wash over me while flying and listening to music, or walking in sublime nature—a perfect early spring day walk around the pond in Wellesley. Above all, having grandchildren, such an unexpected pleasure of empathy and delight—a deeper connection to feeling one’s own humanity, imperfect though mine surely is. Kindred spirits indeed. Every holiday season, watching Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life, when druggist Mr. Gower boxes the ears of his young helper George Bailey for not having delivered a prescription that a distraught Gower mistakenly made out of poison, I well up. Even thinking about it gets to me. “Capracorn” for sure, but bring it on. Then there is Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931). Albert Einstein showed up at the premier. Good for him. City Lights Premier 1931--Chaplin with Albert Einstein In the movie, after many comedic scenes, the audience may wonder how this movie filled with Charlie Chaplin’s humor is to end. Chaplin’s tramp, his pockets empty, but pretending to be rich, has befriended a blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill) on a street corner. He may be a bum, but he has a heart of gold. Even more so the heart of the flower girl. Never having seen her own beauty, she embodies modesty, innocence, and vulnerability. Through selling her flowers, she supports her grandmother with whom she lives in a simple apartment. When she gets sick, they cannot pay the rent, and the landlord threatens to evict them. Despite many setbacks, the bum with pluck gets the flower girl the money for the rent—and for an eye operation, before being thrown in jail. Her sight regained, the flower girl is running a bustling flower shop, searching the face of every well-heeled customer for her secret benefactor. Out of jail but down on his luck again, a shabby Chaplin wanders by the flower shop. When some street-smart boys hit him with a peashooter, he scolds them pathetically, but when he bends over to pick up a flower swept into the gutter, they yank on his ripped pants, and he chases them off. The flower girl and her grandmother are laughing as the bum blows his nose on a rag. He is just raising the flower to his nose when he turns and sees the girl sitting in the flower shop. He is dumbfounded, for it is the blind girl who can now see, and then he breaks out into a broad smile. But what is she to make of the smile of this hunched bum in tatters clutching a pathetic flower? She laughs. “I have made a conquest,” she tells her grandmother. Look, she points out to him, your petals are dropping, but he only beams at her. Still sitting, she offers him a new flower, but he just stands there smiling, and she adds some change, but when she gets up, he turns to go, by now embarrassed that she can see how little he resembles the benefactor of her dreams. She gets up to go after him, urging the change and flower on him, and he turns, smiles at her again. He reaches for the flower, not the change. With a gesture like “here, take it”, she steps toward him with the coin. As her hand presses the coin into his, and her eyes fix on his quizzically, and she touches his hand, his arm, his shoulder, her touch knows before her eyes do. She is eyeing him now, really seeing him in this moment for the first time. “You?” she asks, her hand palming his. Speechless, with the flower in his mouth, he nods, and she presses her hand to her bosom in disbelief. “You can see now?” he asks. At last the realization of who this wretched man is sweeps through her, and she is crying, and the camera fades on Chaplin, smiling, flower in his mouth. The ending of City Lights is one of the unsurpassed icons of sentimentalism. The pathos has won out over the comedy. For all the distance between us and this silent flick, beguiling in its simplicity and tenderness of gesture, its silence and dancelike pantomime as powerful as allegory, we are moved each time we see it. I am not surprised that Martin Brest, director of Scent of a Woman, considers it the most glorious moment in movies, and that every time he thinks about it, it brings him to tears. Me, too, I swear. So, too, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, James Agee. When I learned recently that Albert Einstein, Chaplin's guest the the premier, was in tears at the ending, I was deeply moved once again. Yes, it is a fairy tale, a parable—they deserve our gratitude. "You?" The flower girl and the tramp in City Lights But heaven forfend if tears ever become obligatory. It is perfectly okay to be moved, uplifted, brimming with empathy and yet not shed a tear. What better example does one need than the enduring power of Casablanca? With careful modulation of mood, it studiously avoids tear-jerk moments yet keeps us enthralled. Eighty years after the movie’s release, every other midlife love story is still compared to it and usually found wanting. Bogey’s tough-guy Rick, café owner in Free French Morocco, enjoys wide popular and even critical appeal. To Claude Rains’ corrupt Prefect of Police Louis Renault goes the immortal line, “Under that cynical shell of yours, you’re at heart a sentimentalist”—a charge that the closeted sentimentalist hardly denies, and fully reaffirms when the flame of his Paris days Ilsa Lund walks into his café with freedom fighter Viktor Laszlo. Sam reluctantly plays As Time Goes By for Ilsa, then for Rick: “If you can play it for her you can play it for me,” Rick growls. Suddenly the isolationist who has announced, “I stick my neck out for no one” is lost in reverie recalling “Here’s looking at you, kid,” and recoups his lost idealism first by advising a young refugee couple gambling for their lives to place their chips on number 22, and ultimately sending the refugee couple that is Ilsa and Laszlo on their way as well. The agent of change in Rick is Laszlo, the shining white-knight idealist, who welcomes Rick back to the fight even though it means that Ilsa and Bogey will always have Paris, but nothing more. Before we are done, Renault has called Rick a sentimentalist on four occasions. Casablanca’s appeal suggests one kind of thing that can move us in this world. The appeal is not just that this is a tale of lost love, the eternal triangle; the appeal is certainly not merely the exotic backdrop of war-weary Morocco and the villains of choice in Hollywood, Nazi thugs. It is not just the appeal of a superb cast rich in personality types. It is in the play of isolationism versus idealism, personal and national. Above all it is in the dominant mood created by the masterful play of cynicism softened by sentimentalism, sentimentalism reined in by cynicism. The one plays off against the other, and restores to sentimentalism the power it has lost as generations have wearied of excessive expression of emotion. As time goes by, Bogey’s affective, idealistic core hidden beneath a world-weary facade, his self-sacrifice as commendable as Chaplin’s, have lost little of their power. Closeted sentimentalist Rick with Sam at Rick's Cafe in Casablanca Laughter and tears aside, these are perilous times for sentimentalists, and something ought to be done about it. Deeply embedded in the cultural discourse is the common assumption that sentimentalists suffer from an affliction. They name us sentimentalists but to dismiss us: “Sentimentalists, get real.” It is time to stop oppressing sentimentalists, free them from persecution! What’s in a name like sentimentalism, really? Sentimentalism supposedly implies unwarranted optimism. To be afflicted with a sunny disposition is to be delusional, in denial, living in a fool’s paradise, cynics say. The optimist never met a scumbag (their word not ours) he did not like. In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the cynic is Scrooge, the sentimentalist his nephew, whom I confess I played in my first-ever role on stage, in the fourth grade... Playing Scrooge's nephew with Scrooge's long suffering Bob Cratchit in 4th grade More than optimism, sentimentalism suggests emotionalism: feeling some things to excess, and other things not enough. And having such feelings an excessive amount of the time. The question is, who says? Whose “excess”? And who says being emotional is another name for not thinking clearly, as if clarity requires the repression of emotion. I have nothing against clear thinking, but are not feelings also thoughts? Is thought pure logic and nothing more? And must logic studiously avoid feelings as illogical? Is the “pure unvarnished truth”, often “coldly” spelled out, really an emotion-free zone? And is not the “cold truth” informed by some emotion, though not one that leads to feelings of warmth? To exclude emotions from a seat at the table is a bit like a corporate board being dominated by shareholders denying other kinds of stakeholders a chance to be heard. Cynically, the critics dismiss good things and big ideas with belittling and put-down epithets. This is the old trick of substituting for a complimentary epithet a parallel but dismissive one: the dramatic is dismissed as theatrical. To a cynical beholder, the beautiful is pretty, meaning insubstantial, unmoving, the ultimate in faint praise. Countering every sympathetic term like heartwarming or poignant are knee-jerk put-downs to suit every kind of critic: for the laconic there are romanticized, quaint, maudlin, mawkish, insipid, smarmy; for the verbose, tugging at the heartstrings, pulling out all stops, seen through rose-tinted glasses; for the food-fixated, saccharine, sappy, syrupy, treacly, gooey, cloying, sugar-coated, confection, or corn. These critics suffer from the bane of the mixed metaphor, or what the British delightfully call a muddle: sweetness of one kind unfairly used to implicate sweetness of another. The critics who accuse others of a taste for bromides ought to wash out their own mouths. The critics who deplore everyone else’s whining had better stop their own whining first. Put another way, in life’s struggle to approach ever nearer to objective truth and proper conduct, sentimentalism is usually considered an obstruction. But it just might be the path. Even to acknowledge the reality of a thing called proper conduct is a highly uncynical act, a highly optimistic one, a decidedly idealistic one. I’ll take the tag “idealist” over “cynic” on my epitaph any day, and who wouldn’t? Sentimentalism is second nature to an idealist, if not first. But not according to the self-described realists, who indulge in blind cynicism and short-sighted suspension of disbelief. Again, like Dickens’ Scrooge. Even worse, realists rail against sentimentalists for being self-absorbed. It is the sentimentalists who deceive themselves, they say. Who are naïve bleeding-heart liberals. Who indulge in fantasy. Are escapist. Fond of lost causes. After all, reality is not so clean-cut, and never was. Reality is all that counts, they say. Life is all film noir and sad endings. Sentimentalists claim to feel others’ pain and shed wet tears, but those who do the real suffering, if they cry at all, cry dry tears. They hold back their tears, while sentimentalists, suffering from a low pain threshold, cry all the more. They are wimps. If not less than zero, they are less than they ought to be, being “reduced to tears.” Even when not weeping, sentimentalists are found guilty of a certain irresponsible vagueness. They are not in charge of reality, let alone their emotions, and react inappropriately. Allegedly lacking a precise world-view, sentimentalists are considered incapable of emotion suited to the occasion. To some ears, their feelings ring a false note. When they are accused of “false sentiment,” they are left to wonder when sentiment is unarguably “true.” Probably many more often than we realize, I would say, which the gainsayers would dismiss as “wishful thinking.” At least, in our age of female ascendancy and male vulnerability, and outing of gender stereotyping, we hear less of anyone being dissed as a doe-eyed do-gooder, all happy-talk and fluff, a Mary Poppins, a Goody Two Shoes, or a Pollyanna. Worse than vagueness may be the anti-sentimentalist’s perception of emptiness and smugness on the part of anyone who could wear a smiley-face lapel button or use a bumper sticker urging us to “Visualize world peace” or cautioning us with “I brake for animals.” So I readily admit the possibility, even prevalence, of false sentimentalism covering something else. There may be fellow travelers using the language of sentiment, and abusing it, guilty of one too many “tenderly” or “bitterly” adverbs cloying the style of gushy mushiness. Novelist Graham Greene is said to have closed a book the instant he read the term “tenderly.” Fellow Brits Digby Anderson and Peter Mullen’s 1998 Faking It: the Sentimentalisation of Modern Society rails against a creeping sentimentality “Does this tide of sentimentality matter? Yes, because it is essentially escapist. It involves the substitution of appearance for reality, of wishes for facts, of self-indulgence for restraint, and of victimhood for personal responsibility.” Ouch. These are perilous times for sentimentalists even without the tears because these are, indeed, perilous times for all of us. It has been decades since the era of MGM musicals, those feel-good song-and-dance extravaganzas, Shirley Temple movies or the sentimental realism of Noman Rockwell, a truly gifted artist who modestly called himself an illustrator. His skill was as fully realized as an Old Master’s. His facility with facial expression and love of humor and gentle irony guided his hand to follow his heart in hundreds of magazine covers, calendars, and ads whose collective nostalgia is instantly recognizable. The Four Freedoms, presidential portraits, Lincoln snapshots, and civil rights works are as solid and full of gravitas and evocation of what truly makes America great as the sculpture of his Stockbridge MA neighbor Daniel Chester French. But lately we seem to find ourselves living in an age of envy redux, of empathy in chains. Religious intolerance multiplies fruitlessly over the face of the earth. The wealthy wannabes dream of pursuing their own playthings and indulging their appetites, but not improving their character. Then there are the unseductive perils of violence and violation of the human spirit. Violent crime may be down slightly one moment, but never down to something our grandparents could understand. Given our abundant overexposure to human misery in all its virulent forms, we have become at once jaded and gluttons for punishment. The drive-by shootings, ethnic hate crimes, marital beatings: the bad has us in thrall, and we are too thick-skinned to feel the pain. Perhaps, consistent with our depleted reserves of aid domestic and foreign, and with our reduced philanthropic zeal, we simply do not have enough emotional energy in reserve to spread compassion in kind. Leading the worldwide assault on sentimentalism and decency alike are the terrorists and over-armed extremists in our midst. None of us can feel secure in our hope that the dark side of human nature will someday be in remission. Though American may strike other peoples as not only the last best hope of mankind, but also the last bastion of opportunity, the American Spirit seems to be faltering, as distrust takes root everywhere among us. We need to remember that empathy, optimism, and sentimentalism are the things the terrorists lack, not the things we must shed. It was our arrogance and hypocrisy, not the better angels of our nature, that triggered this anti-American onslaught. After the Boston Massacre bombing of 2013, Boston emerged stronger than ever—the better angels of our nature were not undone, they were unleashed. If we succeed in putting the latest terrorist act out of our minds, placid life still seems far removed from the good old days. We have no time for joining the organizations and institutions our parents nurtured, like the PTA, the clubs, the church and synagogue, in all of which participation has fallen dramatically over recent decades. We are too busy with our careening careers, too seduced by our cells and virtual-reality isolation to participate in real-time gathering. In the progression from local community to global community, the neighborliness of basic face-to-face interaction has eroded. People get extremely exercised about the mores of people they have no wish to know personally and understand. On the plus side, I do notice that on my walks, much more than I recall in pro-Covid days, strangers walking in the other direction say hi, wave and smile. I turn to nostalgia, the elephant in the room. Consider the Civil War reenactor movement. At Gettysburg, in the battlefields of Northern Virginia and elsewhere, reenactors convene by the thousands, accurately attired performers in camp and in battle formation. Their commitment must owe something to a sentimental bond with our nation’s most cataclysmic moment. But getting sentimental over a false understanding of the past is worrisome. In the hands of demagogues, it is dangerous. like Putin’s nostalgia for Russian’s alleged golden age. Demagogues love to evoke motherlands (sorry, ladies, the guys did this) and brush off crimes against humanity. I refuse to let them give sentimentality a bad name. Healthy nostalgia acknowledges the progress of human decency, dignity, and justice that have redefined circumstances that were once considered normal as something no longer to be tolerated. The arc of the moral universe continues to bend toward justice. That hope is what good sentimentalism rallies around. So let’s take a nostalgic look at sentimentalism in the nineteenth century, a subject near and dear to my heart, saith the sentimentalist. Today’s sentimentalists can put themselves in their critic’s shoes by trying to imagine what possessed their own ideological forebears of 200 years ago, when the Romantic era was born. The joy of sorrow was all the rage then, and has fallen from grace ever since. Tears once fell as uncontrollably as peony petals. A sensitivity for the pathetic, once so common, so normal, now seems absurd even to sentimentalists, and the sense in it must now be conjecturally restored by social archaeologists. How quickly we forget that pathetic once conjured up something that was moving in its tenderness (there’s that word again) and sorrow. But joy it was, a joy expressed freely with tears. What is moving to us, over such a span of time, is a moving target. Tastes change. Hard to imagine what the joy of sorrow was once like. It has been a long time since a sentimental novel like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin could so publicly dominate our culture. Edwin Longsden Long, Uncle Tom and Little Eva, 1866 (Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth) The pages she devotes to the death of angelic Little Eva must go on and on until she has dispensed locks of her hair to all bedside visitors. Nathaniel P. Willis, who champions American scenery in the 1840s, reveals the tenacity of such a notion when he declares trees in autumn to be more beautiful than summer, just “as woman in her death is heavenlier than the being on whom in life she leaned.” Given the high rate of morbidity (when the disease they called consumption was truly all-consuming), mourning and the celebration of the dead were a kind of cult, as was the need to snatch precious memory from the jaws of oblivion, whether locks of hair or a daguerreotype of a deceased child. The interest in classics, narrative history, orations, elegies, and garden cemeteries was at its zenith. Even then, sweet was less affecting than bittersweet. Of course, it is a small leap from such pleasant sorrow for loved ones to nostalgia, the cult of wistfulness, of yearning, of longing. Places were familiar haunts, redolent with memories, associations with an imagined halcyon or golden age, a time of peace and plenty in an arcadian landscape, the stuff of pre-Civil War lithographs by Currier and Ives down to early twentieth century tinted photographs of New England byways by Wallace Nutting. Real places were compared to idealized images from the brush of landscape painters like Claude Lorraine, Thomas Cole, and Albert Bierstadt. Albert Bierstadt, Among the Sierra Nevada, California, 1868, detail (Smithsonian) We assume now that these early instances of nostalgia were less self-consciously delusional and escapist than their descendants. But even they were chided for their Claude glasses, the progenitor of rose-tinted glasses, through which they viewed the real world, and romantics were immediately parodied. So laughter, too, had its say. By 1815 the comic character Dr. Syntax in search of the picturesque landscape swoons with “Vale! O vale!” Early nineteenth century critics already delighted in parodying the trances, heaving bosoms, gasps, fainting, and groans as exceeding a realistic canon of delicacy of feeling. Still less can we expect nowadays to convey emotional sensitivity and vulnerability in trembling or a heaving bosom. Thomas Rowlandson, Dr. Syntax Tumbling Into the Water Today non-sentimentalists may unwittingly use once-sentimental terms, but the meaning has been largely transformed. Commonplace is the hyperbolic usage of terms like spellbinding or hypnotic or magical to describe a thing, but never to describe a person. The Victorian writers could more safely than our own acknowledge an emotional vulnerability in terms like enchant, bewitch, enthrall. Awe has descended into “great respect”, if not lost all dignity. Nothing is really awful, frightful or terrible anymore, because nothing is sublime. As the romantic temperament has withered away, reverie has been supplanted by systems of eastern meditation, and rapture and ecstasy, then so often elicited by the sublime, are now largely orgasmic or religious, take your pick. The soul itself has descended from heaven. Feminine traits like purity, delicacy, gentleness have all but disappeared; nurturing survives. Gaiety, once suggestive of innocent joy (“to be young and gay”), has moved on to pursue other interests. What remains of sentimental usage is now reserved for greeting cards and terms of endearment like honey and sweetie. Beneath these survivors, the archeologists of sentimentalism will unearth an entire language lost to us, the liberal use of a vocabulary of sentiment, adjectives like salutary, soothing, melancholy, mournful, blithe, blissful, felicitous, mystical, woeful, lamentable, forlorn, lachrymose. Dear to Victorians, such language is now often described as constitutionally precious and overwrought. If their language is sometimes described as florid, sentimentalism once literally concerned itself with pretty things like flowers, and with nature. Oliver Wendell Holmes, no shrinking sentimentalist he, gave his sister-in-law a copy of Catherine Waterman’s “Flora’s Lexicon, an interpretation of the language and sentiment of flowers” published in 1841. In it we learn that the violet symbolizes modesty because it has “the bashful timidity of the nymph.” And on and on. Such poetic association begins with the plant-names themselves, wildflowers like Queen Anne’s Lace or Virgin’s Bower or Maidenhair or Lady Slipper. Likewise, even recently introduced exotic daylilies with subtle colors and petal contours may be given names like Winsome Passion or Summer Reverie. Confirming the age-old feminization of flora, many girls’ given names themselves are floral. We have to remind ourselves that this is so for names like Cherry, Dahlia, Daisy, Fern, Ginger, Hazel, Heather, Holly, Iris, Ivy, Jasmine, Laurel, Lily, Myrtle, Olive, Rose, Rosemary, and Violet. Why these flora and no others, like Gardenia, Hibiscus, and Orchid, who can say. The words once used to describe the natural landscape seem quaintly antique now: rill, nook, dell, dale, meadow, dingle, glade, knoll, hollow, rill, sylvan vale, copse, grove, grotto, lagoon, strand, haven, isle, greenwood, even scenery. Most suggest an inviting spatial intimacy that seems at the core of the sensibility, and owes much to the texture of England. The romance of place-naming was once epidemic, adorning picturesque scenery. The renowned park designer Frederick Law Olmsted, whose landscapes evoked the picturesque, was fond of place-names like the Ramble, the Playstead, the Fens, the Arborway, Ellicottdale, Fellsmere, Nethermead, Lullwater, Ambergill Falls, and Greensward. Squam Lake in New Hampshire inspired camp names like Rockywold and Deephaven. Everglades, if we stop and think about it, conveys the same magic. We are not infrequently reminded that people once named their houses, not just grand estates, with poetic names, like Tanglewood, Glendale, and Stonehurst. Mark Twain’s Hartford address was Nook Farm, a nook being a bend in the river there. In England, the spatially intricate Lakes District, whose romantic tradition of place-names has charmed legions of tourists on the trail of Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter beguiles us with names like Ullswater, Langdale, Bow Fell, Grasmere, Ambleside, Windermere. So we may think it all began in England, and spread to America as it did to places like Bermuda, but I suspect other cultures share the zeitgeist. Perhaps earlier, in China a house that was more compound than pond might still be called Willow Pond Garden. In both Taiwan and America, you can find a Whispering Pines Inn. And of course, boat names bring out all kinds of tastes, romantic among them. A tour-boat at Niagara is still called Maid of the Mists. Other place-words once suggested something more sinister: beetling cliff, bald pate, blasted crag, howling wilderness, barren waste. Place-names like Purgatory Chasm or Devil’s Den or Norman’s Woe lack power now to remind us that all was not sweetness and light in the hardscrabble world of yore. We forget the canon of romanticism whereby rural landscape beauty was either picturesque or sublime but not both. A mountain waterfall or a vine-clad bower were picturesque, but a limpid pool, a sheet of water on a still lake or a rainbow were sublime. The distinction was far from perfect. In our blasé times sublime seems overwrought, and we in our infinite correctness assert that everyone then was on the lookout for sublimity in both the awesome power of nature’s untamed wild side and the serene repose of nature’s placid side. Of course, the commercialization of some sights, like Niagara, may have something to do with our distrust of sublimity; even sights like the Grand Canyon saved in national parks must be seen alone at dawn to avoid the crowding out of sublimity. Frederick Church, Rainy Season in the Tropics, 1866 (de Young Museum) In less ravaged times, sights spoke more eloquently to listeners who were better schooled. On a romantic ramble, an observer well-read in classical mythology and ancient history, say in Ovid, or at least Shakespeare and poets ever since, could once upon a time imagine Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake at Squam in New Hampshire, druidical oaks at Beaver Brook Reservation, and the haunts of wood nymphs, dryads, and naiads among fern-clad rocks, mossy cushions, and hoary beech groves in the White Mountains. It has been a long while since anyone in these parts has named a ledge the Old Man of the Mountain or a boulder Squaw Rock. But out West Steamboat Spring’s Elk Mountain goes by the name of the Sleeping Giant. The metaphorical cross-linkage of landscape and human beings is a meaning that is largely lost in the mist in our un-nostalgic lives. Though we still have the metaphor earth mother, lesser personifications of individual land and water features have long since become truisms. To describe places, we unthinkingly use terms like head, brow, mouth, tongue, neck, shoulder, arm, elbow, finger, leg, foot, or toe, and barely resonate to the ghost of a metaphor. When we describe a person as willowy long-limbed, or when we hear the loaded word crotch, we no longer think of trees. Much more has faded away since poet Robert Frost compares the snow-clad suppleness of white birches to “girls on hands and knees that throw their hair over their heads to dry in the sun.” Metaphors provide a bond between different realms, another source for feeling connected, for expressing empathy, perhaps compassion. We ought to resist the temptation to assume that metaphors rely on common cultural conventions, that in a world where cultural diversity is on the ascendancy, metaphors are necessarily the early casualties. If Yale literary critic Harold Bloom was profoundly pessimistic about the future of literature, much of his concern was that the death of metaphor is not metaphorical. Back in the day, places at a certain moment or in a certain season were once invested with human moods, and inferentially what were once thought of as strictly female moods at that, stereotypical though the traits may have been, like capricious, charming, sweet. Sweet Auburn was the earlier name for the soft-contoured landscape that would later become a much-revered garden cemetery, Mount Auburn. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthplace in Atlanta is in another Sweet Auburn. A place could be also be described as happy or sad, smiling or frowning, laughing or weeping, inviting or forbidding, soothing or oppressive. “Earth laughs in flowers,” writes Emerson. For Timothy Dwight, at Crawford Notch “the hoary cliffs rising with proud supremacy frowned artfully on the world below.” A scene could blush; there could be a flush of autumnal color. A river could be capricious, a stream jocund, a plain delicate, a hillock dainty. A rain could be gentle. A valley could be inhabited by a noble forest, an oak or elm could be stately or wizened, a hornbeam trunk could writhe and twist, and firs and hemlocks frowning and somber. Clouds of the happiest forms could dance overhead. Plots were once reinforced, we would say marred, by storms outside mirroring inner turmoil, forebear of today’s cinematic cliché of tears streaming down a man’s face seen through rain streaming down a windshield. But ascribing human behavior to place is, after all, bald-faced projection, as psychologists call it, or what Victorian literary critic John Ruskin calls the “pathetic fallacy” (their usage of pathetic, not ours). Still, I will side with poets Wordsworth, Shelly, and Tennyson and poetic artist-illustrator Arthur Rackham any day. Rackham’s gnarled tree trunks sometimes seem goblinesque in their eyeholes, nose-branches, and gaping mouths, a trick that translated well into forest scenes in MGM’s The Wizard of Oz and Walt Disney’s Snow White. Rackham’s American fellow traveler, N. C. Wyeth is secure enough in his athletic manliness and passion to admit to literally embracing nature: “I feel so moved sometimes toward nature that I could almost throw myself face down into a ploughed furrow‑ ploughed furrow understand! I love it so.” Look at his language closely and you find his mistress: “To paint a landscape wherever one is endeavoring to represent with passionate emotion the hot molten gold of sunlight, the heavy sultry distances and the burning breath of soft breezes, one returns home in the evening proud and happily sympathetic in sweaty clothes and burned arms and back. To feel thus completes one’s sense of identification and unity with nature.” And clearly his prodigy son Andrew, reverential in his fifteen-year homage to Helga, subtly fuses her form with nature in a common brush technique to render the fur and the hair that adorn her, and the fronds and grass that adorn the earth. Likewise, people could take on traits from the natural world: a disposition could be sunny or misty, a mood stormy, a brow furrowed, an imagination barren, sympathy could gush, tears flow, a body could be ripe or withering away. A blushing cheek could be a field of roses. A promising man could be felled or cut down in his prime. Even now we cling to a cliché like rugged individualist. Conversely, if there was such a thing as virgin forest, the land could also be violated. In an age that was acutely aware that the ravages of man were fast overtaking those of nature, Paradise Lost haunted the romantic temperament. A hillside could be described as denuded, a landscape pockmarked or bruised. A New Deal artist painted a dustbowl landscape, the contours taking on the form of a raped woman with slashed throat. By now we call a landscape raped without a trace of shock value. The idealized male form once had something of a foothold on the language of landscape. The sensibility found in geological truth anatomical truth as well: if fertile soil was a skin, ledges were sinews and lineaments. Medford, Massachusetts, historian Charles Brooks asserts in 1855, “The earth looks best with its beard.” Beech trunks could be described as muscular, geysers, cascades and pinnacles thought of as phallic. A wave could caress a beach, and the sea or an island could be vexed. Springs were thought of as female. In less strident times, it was the ordered, reposeful landscape that gave rise to a sensual aesthetic of female form, a comparison of the soft contours and secret places of both that betrayed a sensibility that was romantic and reverential, possibly light-hearted as well. A “dimpled stream” is of course not overtly sexist, but Milton in Comus is probably thinking female. Knowing something about landscape mysticism, transcendentalists could observe that what the eye is to the face, open water is to the landscape: limpid, wet, reflective, blue, brown, green. Thoreau says as much in Walden: “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is the earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.” Nathaniel Willis rhapsodizes over “the pellucid bosom” of Lake George. No match for Willis’ delicacy, early explorers called a jagged mountain range in Wyoming Les Grands Tetons, and buttock-like protuberances buttes, Native Americans called Mount Rainier the “Fountain Breast of Milk White Waters.” For Victorians landscape could have a bosom or dimple as much as a fetching miss in risqué literature could have a rosebud, a bush, a sacred grove, a secret bower, or a perfumed garden. Colette calls the lush upper lip of a courtesan her Cupid’s bow. In Poros, Greece, my Greek host once offered me a room with a view of the Sleeping Woman, the sunset silhouette of the mountains near Epidaurus that formed a reclining woman from chin to bosom to abdomen to knees and shins. Mother Earth or earthy mother, both can be said to undulate in soft supple contours. Indeed, for lovers locked in embrace and lost in passion, the outside world ceases to exist, and their bodies are the four corners of their shared world. But much survives to legitimize the power of sentiment-based rhetoric. Lincoln used such language poetically and sparingly in such phrases as mystic chords of memory and better angels of our nature. Much of the Gettysburg Address imparts the emotion so dear to sentimentalists without their verbal excesses. For them, the Address itself is hallowed ground. We have lost the taste for the sentiment and classical excesses of the main speaker of the day, Edward Everett. Much was made of allegory, of symbolism. Coincidence is a perceptual invention of our own scientific era. For allegory and symbolism, we must turn to political cartoons where the shorthand stock imagery of elephants, donkeys, and peace pipes still works. We cry touché, critics cry cliché. Alert readers of Shakespeare will recognize the selfsame mirroring of universe and protagonist in Macbeth, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream. The phenomenon in other cultures like the Chinese is the principle of correspondence. Elements which we would find disparate their true believers considered to be related, ordered in universal harmony. Woman and man, yin and yang, hot and cold, sea and mountain...sound familiar? Plots were also marred by the author’s facile reliance on melodrama, fatalism, and doom, forebear of today’s supernaturalism. The protagonists in the early nineteenth-century sentimental novels were wooden, good or evil, the heroine full of the milk of human kindness, the cad ruined forever. Lovers’ emotions sprang from the breast rather than the gut, people were made for each other, but not for our real world or our escapist one either. If a woman wept, her interlocutor who of course worshipped her would track her tear’s fall from cheek to bosom; even, in what must surely be subliminally erotic, kiss the tears off the weeper like pearly dew drops on the rose. The excess of such patently unrealistic detail may have created an exquisite fantasy world of delicacy of feeling that readers longed to linger in, but reality it could never claim to be. Were Dickens alive today, serious critics would dismiss A Tale of Two Cities as mush, its plot as contrived. It has been a long time since Sydney Carton offered himself up to the guillotine for his look-alike saying, “It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done. It is a far, far better place I go to than I have ever been.” Yet the emotional and story-line equivalent is alive and well in Harlequin Books. Radical feminists do not read romantic novels for pleasure, but those novels fly off the shelf, and their readers have heard about liberation, taken from the movement whatever makes sense for them, and still willingly escape to the world of sentimentalism. Though forbidden the vocabulary of sentimentalism, millions read romantic novels and enjoy three-hanky movies, and not all of them are women. Some of the writers are men writing under a female pseudonym. It is not the rosy scenarios and happy endings, but the compassion along the way, that must never be forgotten. Having said that, I admit I still like happy endings. As a landscape architect, I am moved by the vision of immersion in an intimate dell where one comes upon a manifestation of compassion that inspires one to take heart and take action, for environmental and social justice. (C) Thomas M. Paine 2024

Are they cheering or jeering? Where's this guy's hindsight? (created with Shutterstock's AI) We live in an age of arrogance, and cognitive bias Covid.  Take, for example, 20/20 hindsight. A lot has been written about the hindsight bias. Here’s my take. Merriam Webster defines 20/20 hindsight as “ the full knowledge and complete understanding that one has about an event only after it has happened .” Sure, just a little Monday-morning quarterbacking and second-guessing. What could possibly go wrong? What Merriam-Webster meant to say is “the full knowledge and complete understanding that one believes they have” about the past event. The Monday-morning quarterbacks are utterly confident that they can explain the essential causal sequence that unfolded in the game, whether football or politics or worse. They are second-guessing, and likely guessing wrong. The pundits and pols are utterly confident that they know enough to fault people, other than themselves, for having acted without knowing what allegedly smart, well-informed people now know about their predecessor’s actions. The pundits might expound that what happened was so inevitable, or so avoidable. They may even go so far as to blame past wrongdoers for failing to know what we know, or believe what we believe, and judge them by our standard—in other words, for failing to adhere to a norm that only became a norm subsequently. T hey believe that they can confidently judge long-dead perpetrators who conveniently are no longer around to defend themselves. Their hubris allows them to expound what they believe without the disclaimer that of course the future will deliver more nuanced, fairer, and truer insights that may prove them to have been shortsighted, perhaps as much in their own ways as their predecessors were in theirs.  Our current understanding is nothing more than that—current, not future. And it is swayed by too many “known knowns”— the “availability heuristic.” The more garbage is out there, the more it confirms itself.              As if all this were not enough, we have the slippery slope of language itself—how it morphs from one meaning to another. I was struck by this at the Massachusetts Historical Society while talking to a Native American who quoted a 17thc. document’s allusion to “reducing” her forebears. For her, the meaning was obvious: reducing the numbers of her people was nothing short of genocide.  I nodded, but later confirmed that 17th c. texts often use the word “reduce” to mean something closer to its literal original meaning, “lead back.” That is, the Anglos who had come into the indigenous people’s world uninvited hoped to convert them to Christianity and improve their lives by leading them back from ignorance—as if the white man’s ways were less ignorant than theirs. Not great in hindsight, but not genocide. Again, we must do our best to understand the norms of previous times, and that includes the norms of language in their day.              Most irksome to me is mixing the fad of textualism aka originalism in reading our Constitution with a non-original interpretation of the language in that document. No example is more flagrant than the interpretation of the Second Amendment’s phrase “well-regulated militia” to allow unregulated ownership of weapons with lethal firepower the framers of the Constitution could not possibly anticipate.  If the framers were wary of poorly regulated militias in their day, what would they make of our weaponized world now?  This judicial hindsight is the wishful thinking of the gun lobby. But really, how does the 20/20 hindsight bias not intrude on legal outcomes?  For example, lawsuits against boards for not knowing what later became known and therefore failing to do the right thing, as defined in hindsight?  We know the outcome, bad or good; they could not. We should not make the bias mistake of blaming some people for their role in a bad outcome and crediting others for their role in a good outcome. Nor should we overzealously apply our notions of good and bad to former times when evil and injustice were far more prevalent than in our own worrisome era. The judgmental question ought to be simply this: was the person then acting decently according to the norms of their times? And how well do we understand those norms? So when opium made its way into the China Trade, an era when everyone was doing it but some were beginning to question it, we might be overly judgmental in our hindsight. We might call them drug dealers, even drug cartels. So might the Chinese. But their moral superiority, at the societal level, vanishes once the Chinese are trading opium internally in the early 20th century, and trafficking in synthetic opioids supplying American addicts. Time to call it a draw? Claiming the wisdom of hindsight while remaining ignorant of extenuating circumstances, some Western scholars might fault the Chinese, inventors of paper, printing, and the compass, for not having long ago put these inventions to good use in precisely documenting their vast territorial claims, instead of relying, even recently, on a vague dashed line surrounding unoccupied islets in the South China, islets far closer to other nations than to the claimant. Sorry, that fault-finding is 20/20 hindsight. What a misnomer! Likewise, future generations will judge ours for failing to do enough to stop global warming. Will that be entirely fair?  So easy for them to formulate the logic, or biologic, that should have guided society, somehow collectively, where it most mattered, to do the right thing. Easier said than done, and then some. So a word of caution to pontificators, me included.  Judge not that ye be not judged. If only the world were truly binary, black and white, male and female, young and old, even past and present. But boundaries are usually blurry. When that reality is a good thing, enjoy the frisson. When it is dangerous, tread lightly. And what is the boundary between good and dangerous?  Between blindsight and insight?  Knowing how blurry the boundary can be is a start. And that applies to the length of time between reality-checks. Accurate hindsight hinges on accurate memory for one’s personal history, and accurate information for preceding eras. But even our recollection of personal events may be inaccurate. Our brains fill in the blanks of our memory with what we think happened, because we are susceptible to what has been called false memory syndrome, or the confirmation bias, or good old-fashioned rationalization, or wishful thinking. Wishful thinking snares us with the sunk-cost fallacy. We may hold onto a loser investment too long, even doubling down on the bet, and end up losing even more by doing so.             Let’s hope that by 2025 a little humility, humanity, and self-awareness will help get us all closer to 20/15 vision.

Welcome to Common Ground!  May you find sought-after information in my Blog Cabin and Gallery.  May you find other unexpected connections—the common ground of decency most of us share despite the diversity of experiences and connections that uniquely define each of us, like cells in a personal mosaic. Mine goes something like this... Netizen Tom Paine Aligning vision, courage, and decency Welcome to Common Ground! May you find sought-after information in my Blog Cabin and Gallery. May you find other unexpected connections—aligning the vision, courage, and decency that most of us share despite the diversity of experiences and connections that uniquely define each of us, like cells in a personal mosaic. Mine goes something like this... Enlarge Mosaic 37,000 photos on stored on cloud 7,500 fitbit points/day (should be 10,000) 52 years married 25 foreign countries visited 7 grandchildren 3 children Blog Cabin

Click anywhere on the mosaic of Tom to magnify and view the tile images.

I was named for two Tom Paines.  One of them was the first Paine forebear to set foot on these shores. ​ But I was also named for Dad’s hero, the free-thinking global citizen Tom Paine, best known for having written Common Sense, the tinder that sparked American Independence. In so many important ways he is our ideological forebear. Thomas Paine Hi, thanks for stopping by! In a world of too much scrolling and not enough strolling, may this website do its small part to build bridges across space and time, bridges that in some modest way are inspired by the arc of the moral universe. Only connect! May this site inspire spirited conversations about our place in our community, our nation, our world, and our history, and share grounds for cautious optimism, one decent story at a time. We all have more in common, and are more connected, than we may realize. Feel free to comment. Onward! Message Me I'm Tom Paine What’s in a name? I was on my way to becoming a landscape architect, trying to safeguard nature, and drawn to beautiful landscapes, when I found out that the name “Paine” descends from “paganus,” which originally meant “rural person.” The name soon came to mean “pagan”—a religious free-thinker, rejecting the urban elites. I was named for two Tom Paines. One of them was the first Paine forebear to set foot on these shores, who I later discovered had styled himself “Thomas Paine Senior of Eastham, in the jurisdiction of Plymouth in New England in America, Cooper.” This cooper also built windmills, the high-tech of the 1600s, across Cape Cod. But I was also named for Dad’s hero, the free-thinking global citizen Tom Paine , best known for having written Common Sense , the tinder that sparked American Independence. In so many important ways he is our ideological forebear. OG Thomas Paine showed the world just how a regular guy with common sense could be a big threat to inaction and antiquated thinking. I began my career trying to safeguard public open space such as the iconic commons and greens spread across New England. I have come to realize that they symbolize the promise of America and its ideals. What better metaphor for cherishing our ideological common ground, and nurturing community? May this website do the same, one visitor at a time. The same thinking prompted me to use a photomosaic for the homepage. Randomly juxtaposing images from one’s life, one’s forebears, one’s children, grandchildren, friends, and passions in a photomosaic—each tile of which is composed of digital bytes, each of them in turn composed of electric impulses interacting with silicone, in a vast cosmos of subatomic particles defying time and space—evokes one’s place-moment in the space-time continuum, the human family, and this planet we all call home. Biography Tom Paine is a lifelong learner, local historian, and environmental advocate focusing on the intersection of local history, historic preservation, sustainability, and public space design. He is active with private philanthropic organizations promoting the preservation of cultural resources, as President of the Friends of Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society , member of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Vice-President of the Robert Treat Paine Historical Trust , and Board member of the Wellesley (MA) Historical Society . He is an authority on the Boston area’s astonishing legacy of firsts across many fields of human endeavor. For over four decades he practiced landscape architecture focusing on sustainability and cultural preservation in the U.S., Great Britain, Taiwan, and mainland China. His bilingual book Cities with Heart (Beijing: China Architecture and Building Press, 2015) is a celebration of open space in the great cities of the world and a compendium of best practices for urban open space planning and design. He received a BA in Architectural Sciences from Harvard College, Masters in Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and MBA from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.